If I were to send 1 BTC to some address, all one would need to steal that money is the corresponding private key. Since a private key is nothing more than a 256-bit number, I was thinking about making a treasure map of sorts.

for example, is a private key. So what sort of treasure hunt can I create that will make it possible for someone to discover the private key and therefore win the bounty?

I'm imagining a series of clues (think National Treasure), but not too obvious. If it's to be a world-wide hunt, it must therefore be difficult to crack. I don't want to hide the private key on a website or anything, but rather have the pieces be freely found in the public. So perhaps

Kinda cool, make it extremely challenging though or someone will get it too quickly. Might want to look into "A Treasure's Trove" and books of that sort for the basics. Also 1 btc seems low for a worldwide hunt, but I guess for some it isn't about the money but the thrill of solving the puzzles.

Kinda cool, make it extremely challenging though or someone will get it too quickly. Might want to look into "A Treasure's Trove" and books of that sort for the basics. Also 1 btc seems low for a worldwide hunt, but I guess for some it isn't about the money but the thrill of solving the puzzles.

Thats the question... How do I make it challenging? And the prize would probably be 1,000 bitcoins

A simple way is that maybe the private key could be derived by a hash of many pieces of data, where each are long enough so that you would need all of them to practically compute the private key. And then you could have arbitrary amounts of data as well.

Also the clues could be clues to find the next clue, which ends by finding the entire private key.

A simple way is that maybe the private key could be derived by a hash of many pieces of data, where each are long enough so that you would need all of them to practically compute the private key. And then you could have arbitrary amounts of data as well.

Also the clues could be clues to find the next clue, which ends by finding the entire private key.

That's interesting. So the first clue would be something like "Who is John Galt?", the answer to which might be "The man who stopped the motor of the world." And if you concatenate those strings, SHA256 it, there's your private key. Something like that?

A simple way is that maybe the private key could be derived by a hash of many pieces of data, where each are long enough so that you would need all of them to practically compute the private key. And then you could have arbitrary amounts of data as well.

Also the clues could be clues to find the next clue, which ends by finding the entire private key.

That's interesting. So the first clue would be something like "Who is John Galt?", the answer to which might be "The man who stopped the motor of the world." And if you concatenate those strings, SHA256 it, there's your private key. Something like that?

Yeah, or you can do what a few others have and just build a brainwallet string of words/ sentence.

just an idea i havetake a picture of a wall in some parking lot preferably with some graffiti on it, and the parking spot above it "2D" will be one of the strings..you could then hint with the city it was taken ....that's of course not fair for everyone who lives far or in a different country...

just an idea i havetake a picture of a wall in some parking lot preferably with some graffiti on it, and the parking spot above it "2D" will be one of the strings..you could then hint with the city it was taken ....that's of course not fair for everyone who lives far or in a different country...

My advice would be to make a first attempt at a national one, and craft a real treasure hunt pointing to a location where the private key is buried. This will solve both the brute-force issue raised by grue and the riddle=>private key conversion.

[OVER] RIDDLES 2nd edition --- this was claimed. Look out for 3rd edition!I won't ever ask for a loan nor offer any escrow service. If I do, please consider my account as hacked.

Instead of using hexadecimal fragments parts of the actual private key, you could use a bunch of words, numbers, phrases, etc strung together as a password for an encrypted key (using the BIP38 encrytion available for many paper wallets).

You could also have a sequence of 'prizes' that could only be claimed in sequence since a portion of previous key could also be used as part of the passphrase to the next one:

password = "test 1234 word 5A23d ..." etc

edit: Someone already suggested using a 'brain wallet' phrase, but BIP38 would be significantly more resistant to password cracking attempts.